On Thursday, October 11th the Just Buffalo reading series brings to town Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson, two young prolific poets whose collaborative book Figures for a Darkroom Voice (with ink drawings by Noah Saterstrom) will be released from Tarpaulin Sky Press next month.

Both Gordon and Wilkinson are authors of numerous books of their own, including Gordon’s conceptual book Inbox which was published earlier this year by local press BlazeVox Books. Gordon’s poetry more often than not strays towards a dense prose of vague language and rhetorical twistings, while Wilkinson’s work is generally fragmentary, often approaching a fairy tale-like narrative relying on common nouns and archetypal characters: wolves, sisters, brothers. Figures for a Darkroom Voice began simply as a way to pass the time during a flight the two poets shared. However, Gordon recently explained it turned into a more serious project: “I think we began working toward a synthesis of our very different approaches to the poem, toward a third, and wholly other, outside thing.”

The end result is a book-length poem sequence consisting of prose, sonnets and fragments with sentences that take off in unexpected directions and return with ghostly repetitions. The poem exists in a strange yet familiar world where “Winter turns birds to a bird-shaped absence in the air. Summer will harden the light into bricks, as all evening it was afternoon. & the misnamed boy tumbles from the sounds ascribed to his future.” In a note on the process of writing Figures for a Darkroom Voice, Gordon describes the book as “a balance between what William James calls the substantive and the transitive; it’s all over the place, but one is able to now and again get some footing.”

The title Figures from a Darkroom Voice is lifted from an Eric Baus poem, and his influence is seen elsewhere with the presence of sleepwalkers and an overall underlying sense of the sinister. Other influences echoing throughout include Peter Gizzi, Elizabeth Willis and David Shapiro. Shapiro’s gentle addresses and anaphoric repetition are nicely recreated and re-envisioned here:

hello, telescope in the trees hello,

trees in the lime-wind hello, boy of the

woodsy traipsing hello, icicle

hello, breathing in a rented room

The poets will read from their individual work as well as the collaboration. Hosted by Kevin Thurston and Aaron Lowinger, the reading is at Rust Belt Books, 202 Allen Street, 7pm. For Gordon and Wilkinson, the Just Buffalo reading is a stop on a ten-day tour that will take the poets to ten cities stretching throughout Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, New York and Illinois.